Albany Furniture
MDCS Migration Service – Platform Transition Use Case – Experience of PT Services
Client: Albany Furniture (Cotton Plant Entity), is a domestic manufacturer of upholstered furniture pieces producing at 5 factories in 4 states.
The Challenge: “We were on an old MAS 200 installation. All of our other entities had been moved to Intacct four years ago. Cotton Plant was the only one that hadn’t and it had been there close to 20 years. The server wasn’t going to make it much longer, and we couldn’t find anyone that could support the product.”
The Goal: “We wanted all of our entities on one system, and leadership was seeking to access all kinds of granular, high-level reporting to gain better insights on their information.”
The Choice to Work with PT: “We’d tried to get this data migrated over at least twice before and it didn’t get done either time. Nobody really knew what was going on, what was done, or what else was needed because the people that were responsible for the project left in the middle. We didn’t have any in-house knowledge of the 20-year old MAS 200 system; we didn’t know how to access the data or pull it in any kind of format that could be imported into Intacct. When we shared our challenges with our VAR partner, they’d suggested we work with Platform Transition on the data migration. After doing a cost analysis I saw that it would have cost me about three times as much to do it on my own.”
The Experience of PT’s Process: “Working with Platform Transition was really smooth and organized. We could have done a better job of making decisions, following through, and validating data on our side. I thought Hugh and the team did a great job of managing the project and keeping things on task. Everything we needed to know was covered on the calls and in email. One of the challenges we faced was getting people on board and meeting deadlines. I think the organization that PT provided through the project kept everybody on task and made sure that they were being completed as needed to keep the project on track and ultimately completed.”
The Greatest Benefits: “We could not have done it without Platform Transition. The greatest benefit was the guidance they’d provided between the two systems which were necessary for us to make the move to Sage Intacct. PT gave us the knowledge we needed to finish the project. They migrated our antiquated MAS 200 historical data to Sage Intacct. All of our entities are now on Sage Intacct and our leadership team can make better-informed decisions. The team can access the system from wherever they are, and I can get to sleep at night, no longer worried about whether or not the system is going to crash – that’s a big one for me.”
Closing Testimonial: “Our accounting team wasn’t going to be able to do it. I would have had to dig in and understand more about the accounting side. The MAS 200 system is so old that the ODBC drivers that let you connect to it and pull data out of the database didn’t support most of the functions we have now with database connections. I would’ve had to write a project around just kind of rebuilding the database on SQL server on the fly. Basically, I wrote a project that was able to extract all that data out and put it into a format that I could work with, then I was going to have to learn that accounting side to figure out exactly what I needed from that data to get it into Intacct’s formats and meet their requirements. I would say it probably would’ve taken me a few months had I done it myself.”
“Working with Platform Transition was a lot faster and cheaper than doing it myself. It was a great value.”